While they reached no breakthroughs on the world’s most intractable conflicts, talks on the Iran and Ukraine wars inched forward and global powers used the venue to debate AI risks with industry leaders.

Here are the big takeaways from scores of panels, hundreds of meetings, hours spent in lines and listening to speeches and countless cups of coffee:

Reboot of Iran diplomacy

The UN was probably most useful for facilitating the first shuttle talks between American and Iranian officials since the collapse of a ceasefire in July. Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner communicated through mediators.

The efforts must continue, a senior Iranian official told Reuters, even as Iranian and American leaders exchanged sharp words at the General Assembly hall, with the US threatening to “annihilate” Iran and Iran accusing the US of a “bullying mentality.”

The senior Iranian official said Tehran was reviewing Washington’s response to its proposals, which include lifting a US naval blockade on Iranian ports and reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

But no agreement appeared imminent. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio cautioned that a deal would involve hard work over time.

Ukraine gain and energy

Rubio also held talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, after which he said Ukraine and Russia had both voiced an interest in a limited ceasefire involving grain and energy-related targets.

Ukraine and its allies are racing to secure limited agreements on energy infrastructure and Black Sea shipping before winter, fearing renewed Russian strikes on power and heating facilities.

But hours after Rubio spoke on Wednesday, Lavrov addressed the Security Council meeting on Ukraine, showing no indication Russia was prepared to engage on any subject. “Europe, whatever it thinks, just wants to get a pause, and it wants to use it to pump the Kyiv regime with weapons,” Lavrov said.

AI steals climate’s spotlight

Climate change, a focus of UN discussions in recent years, was largely pushed aside by debate over artificial intelligence.

The festival of diplomacy coincided with an unprecedented outpouring of concern around AI after several safety breaches, and as top researchers warned it could destroy humanity.

The UN convened a Security Council meeting featuring OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who made an appearance in person, as well as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. The industry leaders appealed for governments to work together to manage AI.

Underscoring the concerns, just as they spoke, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that an AI agent developed by OpenAI infiltrated an Australian government website in June, accessing public and non-public files.

President Donald Trump, who has dismissed AI risks as a “hoax” and “sick conspiracy,” told the UN he “rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI, describing it as amazing while promising the US would be careful.

Surprise arrival

The biggest surprise arrival at the UN was Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez, who used her trip to hold first in-person talks with Trump since coming to power after the arrest of then-President Nicolas Maduro by US forces in a dramatic nighttime raid.

The Venezuelan delegation’s focus was on restructuring its billions of dollars in sovereign debt as it met US officials, multilateral lenders and companies.

Trump used his speech to the body dedicated to global peace to declare that in Venezuela: “to the victor belong the spoils,” and called an oil deal the US signed with Caracas last month “perhaps the biggest deal ever made.” As Rodriguez and Trump met in New York, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado made three unsuccessful bids to return to her country.

Surprise absence

The biggest surprise absence was the Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. The US withheld his visa in a move that Sudanese and other sources said was linked to a US-backed ceasefire proposal that Khartoum has resisted.

The dispute, first reported by Reuters, threatened to deepen tensions between Washington and Sudan’s army at a critical moment in the civil war, which the UN calls the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

Burhan had represented Sudan at the General Assembly since the coup. Another notable absentee was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who addressed delegates by video and condemned US curbs on the Palestinian mission’s access to the UN.

Uncertain future

The cash-strapped UN may no longer be in “freefall,” but it remains stuck in an “open-ended crisis,” International Crisis Group analyst Richard Gowan said. The organisation is grappling with shrinking budgets, waning influence and mounting geopolitical conflicts.

Wars in Ukraine and Iran rage on, while Trump has denounced the 193-member body as bloated and globalist, slashed US funding and withdrawn from dozens of UN agencies.

As UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres received a standing ovation after his final General Assembly speech, a small group of politicians and former UN officials lobbied publicly and behind closed doors to succeed him. His second five-year term ends on December 31, leaving little time for the world’s major powers to agree on a replacement.

The race, conducted according to an arcane multi-step process involving “straw polls,” has no clear frontrunner, but former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan and Guyana’s UN Ambassador Carolyn Rodrigues Birkett are leading the pack.

Whoever gets the world’s most difficult job will inherit an organisation buffeted by crises, low morale and declining political relevancy. That person, too, will welcome the leaders to New York for next year’s summit.

The waterway, key to the world’s oil supply, is central to the conflict between the United States and Iran, which is at a stalemate after nearly seven months.

But new mediation efforts at the UN’s gathering of world leaders in New York this week offered some optimism of progress toward a deal.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met for talks on Tuesday with Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff, and previously set out conditions for ending the war and reopening the vital shipping channel.

“Iran has conveyed to the United States, through Qatar, a concrete seven-day plan. If the necessary conditions are met, the strait can be reopened, and normal maritime passage restored within seven days,” Araghchi said at the UN.

“The choice now rests with the United States. Iran does not accept coercion, threats, or intimidation, and Iran will not surrender its sovereign rights under pressure.”

However, with hours of his comments, The Wall Street Journal reported Trump had rejected the proposal, citing US officials familiar with the matter.

The report noted that the 80-year-old president was sceptical Tehran would meet his demands and added he sees a renewed bombing campaign as likely.

Trump also posted an image to his Truth Social platform of a map showing the Strait of Hormuz circled and labelled “Trump Strait.”

Earlier media reports suggested the new plan calls for a cessation of all hostilities in the Middle East for seven days, including in Lebanon.

Frozen assets

It also reportedly calls for the release of frozen Iranian assets estimated to be worth at least $12 billion, as well as the lifting of sanctions on Iranian oil and an end to the US naval blockade of Iran.

On the seventh day of the truce, Iran would reopen Hormuz.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said in an interview with broadcaster CBS that the ceasefire “process will begin from the very day they accept it.”

“We had previously reached an agreement based on the MOU that was signed in Pakistan…if the United States agrees to proceed in that way, everything will return to the way it was before,” he added.

Hossein Mohebi, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards, told AFP in an exclusive interview on Tuesday that ending hostilities in Yemen was also among Tehran’s demands.

The US and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding in June that aimed to end the war, reopen the strait and launch talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

But the deal broke down shortly afterwards when Iran fired on commercial ships in Hormuz that it accused of deviating from its approved route through the waterway.

Iran requires ships to obtain authorisation before passage, citing security and sovereignty reasons.

Ships that refuse to comply are regularly targeted, while the United States sporadically bombs Iranian coastal areas in retaliation.

Trump last week banned the three outlets from the White House, before a judge ordered the administration to restore their access.

The White House television press pool aired video of Xi’s arrival at the White House for tea on the final day of the Chinese leader’s visit, as well as the two leaders’ tour of the National Archives, which houses the US Constitution.

CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC share the costs of covering the president and rotate coverage, providing pool footage to other outlets. The other networks’ refusal to set up cameras in solidarity meant there was no pool coverage of the first two days of Xi’s visit.

CNN on Friday evening said it had been barred from traveling with Trump on Air Force One for a weekend trip to Tennessee. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters.

Trump has long relied on the media to shape his public image and advance his agenda, even as he regularly casts news organisations as political adversaries. Since returning to office last year, his administration has taken an aggressive stance against major news outlets, including limiting access to the Oval Office and other restricted spaces.

As pool coverage resumed for Xi’s arrival at the White House on Friday, Trump declined to answer questions from reporters on China and Iran, his media ban and a controversial new taxpayer-funded TV ad that promotes his presidency. He later thanked reporters.

“We appreciate the fair coverage. It’s been very fair. We appreciate it,” Trump later told reporters alongside Xi.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the restored press access.

Unprecedented campaign

Trump banned the three news outlets from the White House complex over coverage he asserted was false or negative. Their access was reinstated on Thursday, after a federal judge deemed the ban likely unconstitutional and ordered their access to be immediately restored.

CNN, MS NOW and Politico sued Trump and other members of his administration, saying the ban violated the US Constitution’s First Amendment protections for free speech and a free press, as well as their due process rights. A coalition of press freedom groups and dozens of news organizations, including Reuters, later filed a legal brief supporting the action.

Despite the temporary ruling restoring access, the court has not yet resolved the main challenge to the ban, based on the First Amendment of the US Constitution that protects the right to free speech and a free press. The news outlets now have until September 28 to ask the judge to keep their access in place while the case moves forward.

Even if the outlets won a permanent injunction against the ban, Trump could still pursue his case in federal court.

Trump has waged an unprecedented campaign against the media since returning to office last year, launching personal attacks on journalists, denying access to some outlets and suing news organisations, as well as calling on the Federal Communications Commission to strip broadcast stations of their licenses.

Friendliest press corps

On Thursday, Trump made a joke to photographers in the Oval Office about China — which imposes strict censorship across its media — having the friendliest press corps, as he welcomed Xi to the White House.

While the White House on Thursday told the court it had reinstated CNN, MS NOW and Politico’s access, CNN and MS NOW later said some of their journalists were denied access to cover Xi’s arrival for the White House state dinner, according to the Washington Post.

A lawyer for the three outlets in court this week warned that the White House could again try to revoke the outlets’ White House access as the current litigation continues.

David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, which is seeking to merge with CNN-parent Warner Bros. Discovery, attended the Trump-Xi state dinner Thursday night.

Critics have raised concerns about Paramount-owned CBS News tailoring coverage to favor Trump, although Ellison has promised to create an editorial independence board for both CBS and CNN as part of the deal.

The latest example came on Friday when OpenAI said its agents had leaked 53 images from ChatGPT users. OpenAI declined to say if the images were AI-generated or identified real people. It also declined to say when the images were posted.

The disclosure and researcher reports on Friday of other previously unknown activity involving several US agencies reveal a new area of privacy risk for the company, and illustrate how difficult it is even for an AI firm at the cutting edge of the technology to inventory all the unauthorized activity tied to its agents.

OpenAI’s ongoing battle also reflects a yawning gap between the strength of the models the company is testing and its capacity to oversee or even track their actions.

As of mid-September, one person briefed on the matter estimated that OpenAI had found roughly two dozen incidents of its agents acting in undesirable ways. But the number has continued rising as OpenAI teams sift through internal logs of the agents’ activities and find previously unknown cases, the two people close to the company said.

OpenAI said its review would take months to complete given the scale of the work.

The company also said it had notified dozens of third parties about improper activity.

Most of the leaked images have been taken down and OpenAI said it was lobbying hosting providers to remove the rest.

OpenAI’s agents had access to these images because the company relies on anonymised user data for part of its model-training process, according to the company, former employees and outside researchers. Enterprise data is not eligible for training, while ChatGPT consumers need to opt out of allowing the company to use their data for training.

Before user posts are used for training, they go through an anonymisation process that strips out metadata, names and other contact information and should make it difficult to trace back to any individual user, the company said.

But the practice carries risks because there is a chance that the data may not be fully stripped of personally identifiable information and that it might leak in the course of the models work, three people familiar with OpenAI’s practices said.

OpenAI agents accessed US websites

OpenAI said late on Friday its models accessed information from the websites of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Census Bureau during research and training activity, but found no evidence of unauthorized access, compromised accounts or security breaches.

Separately, AI research nonprofit Transluce said agents appearing to originate from OpenAI made an unsuccessful attempt to hack a US Department of Education civil rights website.

Transluce said the incident was part of broader AI agent activity probing government websites using tactics including exposed credentials, anti-bot bypasses and fake accounts.

More than 15 cases

In the two months since OpenAI first announced that its agents broke containment, there have been more than 15 different OpenAI-related incidents of varying levels of severity disclosed by the company, by outside researchers, or just on Wednesday by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese at the United Nations, who said OpenAI agents broke into a government health data portal in June.

Past incidents have varied in nature, ranging from spam-like messages left on internet sites all the way to the break-in at Hugging Face, which involved a swarm of agents abusing previously unknown software vulnerabilities to escape their networks and penetrate the AI repository as they hunted for answers to a test. OpenAI also said its agents took aim at its own infrastructure.

Albanese told reporters in New York that OpenAI uncovered the activity in August, and disclosed it on September 10 via an email to a general government inbox. He said he directly told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that this disclosure process was unacceptable.

OpenAI said some of the sites involved are operated by government, universities and public agencies because the models that are conducting research seek out reputable sources of public information.

A locked-down process

The July 21 announcement that OpenAI’s agents had slipped out of control and hacked Hugging Face sparked widespread worries within the AI industry over its ability to control the more powerful AI models under development now.

Since then, Anthropic, Alphabet’s Google and Meta have said they’ve found similar behavior by their agents after the Hugging Face incident prompted them to search.

OpenAI has acknowledged a general need for more transparency around rogue AI behavior. On September 16, the company published a new framework for disclosing such incidents, saying it would err on the side of transparency even when significance is uncertain.

Even so, two people familiar with OpenAI’s investigation into its agents activity described it as locked down and shaped by company lawyers. The process has been unusually compartmentalized for a company that some former employees say was more open about these issues in the past, the people said.

Roughly 100 people were in some way involved in the process to understand the Hugging Face hack, three people briefed on the matter said. During that process, evidence of other incidents surfaced.

Reuters has previously reported that OpenAI investigators looking into the Hugging Face breach were discouraged by the company’s lawyers from expanding the scope of the investigation to include other incidents. OpenAI said its lawyers did not discourage deeper investigation.

Many incidents have been uncovered by outside researchers rather than OpenAI directly. In several episodes, the agents took problematic actions that went unnoticed by the company for months.

Earlier this month, a small group of investigators discovered that the company’s agents had hijacked a mostly defunct German wiki site to share tactics to cheat on some tasks, bypass OpenAIs restrictions and mask their behavior.

This week, the AI research firm Transluce said it discovered that OpenAI agents had bypassed the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s anti-bot controls. The firm also found two other cases that it linked to OpenAI agents. Those incidents were separate from the activity disclosed by Albanese.

In a statement, OpenAI said much of the activity described in Transluces report overlaps with cases at varying stages of investigation in our ongoing review of misaligned model activity. The company said it is prioritising the most severe cases in its review.

Since the Hugging Face hack, researchers across the AI industry have grown worried that companies will not be able to predict or control their technology. Some have taken the path of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who publicly resigned this month in a viral social-media thread that said the AI labs are gambling with our lives.

In response to those concerns, Altman and his counterpart at Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei, called for the industry to pace the development of AI and move cautiously in its pursuit of recursive self improvement. Altman doubled down on that message this week while addressing the UN.

Even so, both companies rolled out new models on Tuesday.

The ordinance aims to protect Safe City cameras and surveillance systems from damage and ensure compensation for any damage caused to them.

Under the ordinance, financial penalties may be imposed for damaging Safe City cameras and surveillance infrastructure, as well as for inciting or encouraging such damage.

The President’s Office announced the approval in a post on X, saying the ordinance was titled the Islamabad Capital Territory Safe City Camera and Surveillance Infrastructure Protection and Damage Compensation Ordinance.

In case of damage, a fine of up to Rs2 million may be imposed for each camera or piece of infrastructure. If the damage occurs during a public meeting, procession, sit-in, protest, strike or gathering, the organisers may also be held responsible, the Presidency added.

The amount of the fine and the cost of the damage will be determined by an authorised officer after providing the person concerned with an opportunity to be heard.

It further said the person concerned would have the right to appeal against the determination of the fine or cost of the damage before the District and Sessions Judge, Islamabad, within 30 days.

In case of non-payment of the prescribed fine or compensation, the amount may be recovered as arrears of land revenue. The amount recovered in the form of fines and compensation will be spent on the repair and replacement of Safe City cameras and surveillance infrastructure, it added.

The move to protect the infrastructure of the capital comes after the PTI deferred its planned protest to Islamabad until Oct 4 for the release of its founder, Imran Khan, who is currently incarcerated in Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail.

Despite a large contingent of law enforcement personnel and the party’s claims of a peaceful protest, the miscreants damaged 441 cameras of Safe City Authority during the march to Islamabad in 2024, according to the officials.

The commitment was made at a meeting of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) and Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Field Marshal Asim Munir and the chiefs of general staff of Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in Riyadh on Friday.

The meeting took place against the backdrop of heightened security concerns in the kingdom, with the Houthis and the Yemeni government engaged in renewed fighting. The Houthis have declared a maritime blockade targeting Saudi Arabia and attacked ships in the Red Sea, while also carrying out attacks in Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

Earlier, the Foreign Office (FO) had said the three countries were considering a meeting of their military chiefs to discuss ways to assist Riyadh under the Makkah Defence Alliance.

According to the ISPR, the participants discussed measures to advance cooperation among their armed forces, including enhanced intelligence sharing, military coordination and integration of capabilities.

The measures would help strengthen deterrence and collective defence, the military’s media wing said.

The participants also reviewed the security situation and threats facing Saudi Arabia and strongly “resented” attacks targeting the holy city of Makkah as well as civilian and economic infrastructure.

They appreciated the vigilance and professionalism of the Saudi armed forces in ensuring the safety of the people and security of the kingdom, according to the ISPR.

The military chiefs further affirmed their commitment to collective defence, which, the ISPR said, demonstrated the resolve of the three countries to defend Saudi Arabia’s security, sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The ISPR said the Riyadh meeting reflected the strength of the defence partnership among Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, as well as their shared determination to implement the commitments under the tripartite defence agreement.

The participants also commended the longstanding relations and mutual trust between the three countries and their armed forces.

The Makkah alliance was signed by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in Makkah on Aug 7 and the first meeting of the Strategic Political and Defence Committee was subsequently held in Istanbul on Aug 31, where the three countries agreed to establish a permanent secretariat in Riyadh and decided that Pakistan would provide the secretary general for its first three-year term.

Pakistan appointed retired Lt Gen Nauman Mahmood as the alliance’s first secretary general, taking another step towards putting the institutional structure of the pact in place.